Cyber-d Subjects: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

Abstract

In recent times, concerns have been raised by writers, and others associated with the
literary field, about the fact that the novel may be a dying art and that the habit of
reading among the general populace is on the decline. One of the key reasons cited
for the same is the emergence of the cyberspace, which offers a number of options
for leisure time activities that compete with reading for the attention of the masses.
Furthermore, it is commonly argued that the cyberspace has impacted and altered
people’s psyches as the information overload and ready access to various modes of
entertainment cause people to lose the capacity to maintain focus for an extended
period of time on any one particular task. This also, purportedly, causes people to
become more and more reliant on machines to do their everyday tasks, their thinking
for them. Such concerns are highlighted in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and Gary
Shteyngart’s A Super Sad True Love Story (2010), both of which are set in dystopic
societies where people use their devices as crutches to enable them to navigate the
world. These anxieties, this paper will argue, are caused by shifts in the literary fields
which have been brought on by increasing possibilities in terms of creation, dissemination,
and reading of texts in the internet age. These misgivings, therefore, will be
framed and unpacked to understand and highlight their ideological underpinnings.